‘There is a way to design for everybody,’ began Vasilis van Gemert in his introduction to this hands-on workshop on Day 1 of WDCD 2018. But here’s the catch – in order to create truly inclusive products, he added, you have to forget the idea that you can make anything that works equally well for everyone. Enter: The Exclusive Design Method, a brainstorming tool for making tailor-made solutions for real people.
Hosted by Communication and Multimedia Design (CMD) Amsterdam, in this session participants were challenged with a deceptively simple task: in small teams, design a user experience for one of three real people sitting in the room.
But how to proceed when knowing that these people each had different, and special needs? How to design a pleasurable web interface for Larissa, who is blind? Can we come up with fun and functional solutions for those of us like Marijn, who is motor impaired? What does good design mean when you are deaf, like Marie? And how can we incorporate these values into our creative practice?
Inventing design solutions suited for Marie, who is deaf
Just add nonsense
In the second part of the workshop, participants broke into groups to tackle these questions, armed with a set of ‘Exclusive Design Principles’: a method which takes the more well-known Inclusive Design approach, and twists it on its head. Here, the tenets change to accommodate a much more focused attitude, where empathy and subjectivity take the lead:
- Deal with all contexts— becomes — provide a unique experience
- Be consistent — becomes — be innovative
- Prioritize content — becomes — prioritise identity
- Add value— becomes — add nonsense
Over the course of the next hour, ideas flit back and forth across the room, as the participants worked together with Marijn, Larissa and Marie to identify specific problems and opportunities for design interventions. Proposals included smartphone apps to ease communication on public transport, extensions to Google Maps which turns it into a wayfinding service for seeing-eye dogs, and handy toolboxes which support teachers in adapting their classes for people with disabilities.
Larissa’s dog takes a rest while the team discusses solutions for her
Global issues, extremely local solutions
True to the Exclusive Design principles, every idea had a surprising aspect of humour and wittiness about them. In closing, moderator Vasilis van Gemert, whose research focuses on accessibility and interaction design, stressed the value of ‘extremely local solutions for innovation’. Sometimes, thinking big means staying close.
Read more about the Exclusive Design Challenge at vasilis.nl